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The Netherlands is creating its own government Linux distro and open-source office suite. Image created with Google Nano Banana 2.
Now, the Netherlands is exploring switching from Windows and proprietary software to Linux and open-source programs. The Dutch are in good company. Earlier in September, the Swiss military and other agencies announced they were jumping to Linux and openDesk, a German open-source office suite. Before that, the list of European governments shifting to Linux includes--deep breath-- Austria, France, Germany, and Ireland.
Why are they doing this? Simple, they don't trust American companies to keep their data safe and their services running if President Donald Trump decides he doesn't like what their countries are doing or he gets up on the wrong side of the bed. Can you blame them? As I wrote this article, Trump had summoned top tech leaders such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, and Tesla’s Elon Musk to lecture them on how they should run AI. Whoops! I mean Super Intelligence (SI), of course.
With America's tech leaders kowtowing to Trump over such stupidities, you can be sure that they'll obey him when he tells them to give European data to Trump's oxymoronic Department of Justice or cut off services to European governments. After all, he's already done it. In 2025, the US government took down the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Outlook account because the ICC had issued an arrest warrant for sometime Trump ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Since the ICC is based in The Hague, the Netherlands had a front-row seat to Microsoft doing Trump's bidding.
So it is that the Dutch government has started developing Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid DAWO (“Digital Autonomous Work Environment for Government”). This digital sovereignty, open-source government workplace stack is in limited pilots.
DAWO is intended to replace more than the Windows desktop. Dutch developers initially tried openSUSE and Fedora before choosing the Dutch Linux distribution NixOS.
NixOS works well for office fleet rollouts and management because its declarative configuration and Nix package model make it easy to create a reproducible Linux desktop with packages using immutable, signed content. This gives administrators the power to describe the intended state of a desktop fleet in code, à la Infrastructure as Code, and rebuild systems consistently, which is great for security, updates, and rollback,
On top of NixOS, France’s La Suite and Germany’s openDesk are being considered for the desktop suite. Another possibility is that the Netherlands will move to a home-brew of MijnBureau, a self-hosted suite assembled from open-source projects including Nextcloud for storage and collaboration, Collabora for office documents, Element for messaging, and OpenProject for work management. This is a more ready-to-run office suite than a Netherlands agency's built-from-scratch “Dutch Office” application.
The Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, with state IT organizations SSC-ICT, DICTU, and DUO-ICT, is building DAWO. Eight towns are currently running trials, and the first stable DAWO release is expected to show up by the end of 2027. Moving from one operating system and office suite to another is never easy.
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